


Not Even Inuit Stories

by pqlaertes



Category: due South
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-06
Updated: 2012-04-06
Packaged: 2017-11-03 04:26:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/377237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pqlaertes/pseuds/pqlaertes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When one of Fraser's stories fails to have the usual effect, Ray goes to Ange. </p>
<p>Due Credit 1999, 2nd Place Ray Vecchio/Other Woman</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not Even Inuit Stories

For that first seven seconds, the pillow under her cheek smelled like cologne, the stuff that comes in the bottle with a mountain on it. She was all curled around it, and at any moment it would move and she would feel that uneven press of skinny ribs against her cheek and she'd move enough to kiss the line of soft hairs trailing down from the navel.

And then the alarm rang again and it was a pillow, cotton against her cheek and smelling like papaya shampoo and nothing much else. Just a pillow. And it was time to go to work. Marriage smelled like cologne and divorce smelled like papaya -- shouldn't so be hard to remember.

This morning the alarm turned out to be the telephone. She picked it up, her eyes open but unfocused, and slipped it between her ear and the pillow. The clock resolved into an awful angle; four in the oh-god. "Whaa?"

"Ange?"

Too surreal. "Ray?"

"I'm sorry. " There was that low ache in his voice, that _officer down_ baseline all cops know by heart. At four in the morning, there is only bad news.

"Where are you?"

"Never mind. Outside. Go back to sleep."

"I'll be down in a minute."

Robe. Slippers. Hairbrush. Oh, why bother?

Down the hall, past the door to the attic. The attic where, in a big cardboard box, were two dozen hardback fairy-tale books -- _Rumplestiltzkin_ , _The Elves and the Shoemaker_ , _Puss in Boots_ and so on, and a crowd of fuzzy animals with rattles in their bellies or bright eyes that opened and closed. All bought in celebration of a few mornings of merciless nausea and light-headedness. It had turned out to be the flu.

Down the stairs, where family pictures crowded out the blue twining flowers of the wallpaper. Ray's face appeared by the sixth step down and was gone by the ninth.

When she opened the door he was standing at the edge of the porch, facing away, the cellular phone still in his hand; his head was bent down so that he looked grotesque, a headless body. "Hey, you want in here or what?"

It took a moment for him to come back from wherever he was. She caught the red-brown blotches on his perfectly cut jacket as he turned around. When he tucked the phone away she saw the tight Escher tiling of fish and bat and lizard on his tailored vest, also smeared with drying blood. "Hi, Ange." He had that way of always trying so hard to be nonchalant with her.

"Jesus, Ray. What happened?"

He looked down at himself. "Oh my god." Like he hadn't even known it was there.

It wasn't his; she could tell that now. But somebody had been bleeding a hell of a lot. "Ray?" The morning air was very cold and he had left his coat somewhere. He didn't seem to notice, Ray, who kept the bedroom thermostat between seventy-five and eighty from November to April.

"That's fourty-four suits." He muttered strangely.

"Okay, Ray. Okay. Come on." He let her walk him inside, and then stood in the arch between the front room and the kitchen.

"Want some coffee?"

He leaned against the side of the arch, boneless under his ruined, wonderful suit.

"What happened, Ray?"

"Fraser's in the hospital."

"The Mountie?" Frannie filled her in on things at the grocery store every week. It was the Mountie who made Frannie pass reluctantly by the Ben & Jerry's and put anything with the Hershey's logo back on the shelf.

He shot her a look she recognized; he'd forgotten that she wasn't there anymore to know all his friends. Not that he'd ever had a whole lot of friends for her to know. "Yeah, the Mountie."

"Is he okay?"

Ray stumbled over and sat down at the kitchen table. "Bullet just grazed his shoulder; he lost a lot of blood but he should be home by Thursday." It came out flat and simple, as if he'd rehearsed it, something you learn to do when you're delivering four-in-the-morning news.

She turned her back on him and fumbled in the breadbox, reaching automatically for the blueberry muffins he liked. Of course there weren't any; she hadn't baked blueberry muffins for years.

"Fraser, he does this . . . this thing." Ray said quietly. "It's stupid. Whenever he wants to talk somebody into something he tells them a story."

She turned on the coffee machine and pulled out two mugs. "Like what?" Don't push, don't ever ever push; that was the first rule she'd learned with Ray.

"Caribou stories, Eskimo fairy tales, I dunno . . . He just, he tells them these damn stories and it always works. Hit men give him their guns, kids do their homework, saps help him do community service. It's like hypnosis or something."

Yeah, she could guess what sap usually got taken in by the stories; Ray always was one hell of a soft touch. She kept her eyes on the coffee as it finally started to drip blackly into the bottom of the glass pot.

"It scares the hell out of me, the way he does it; I mean, people's lives are usually on the line, usually his." She caught a glance at his angry little smile "Or mine. So day before yesterday there was this girl out on a ledge -- twelve-year-old cokehead -- and he talked her down. Just told her this story about a caribou and she climbed right back inside." Ray stared at his hands. "We were after her dealer last night. Little rat guy, you know?"

She knew.

"Seventeen-year old little rat with a goddam Bulldog .44."

"Jesus."

"So we're behind the Riv and the rat's behind a dumpster and Fraser stands up and starts in on one of these stories, Eskimo grandmothers and tundra and all this crap. Anybody else woulda pulled him down, but no, these stories always work, right? So I let him do it."

"Ray . . . " Oh yeah, no wonder he'd come here. Between them, they knew a little something about unexpected failure.

"I let him do it. He's telling the story. He's telling the story and then . . . "

He put his head down on the table. Boiling coffee made wet popping noises behind her. She took his hand between both of hers and felt that old perfect fit, his long slender hand folding around her fingers.

"It was like it was impossible, you know? Those damn stories always work." His voice was muffled. "It looked really bad at first, all this blood everywhere. I called it in and I tried to hold onto him, you know, to just, just let him know he wasn't alone, cut the bleeding down, I dunno. But there was all this blood and he slipped out of my hands."

She moved close and put her arms down over his shoulders.

"He slipped." And then he pressed his face into her robe.

So she just stood there; he always spooked so easy when he was like this. One word and he'd clam up and run for cover. She stroked his head and shoulders in that old pattern, feeling the soft prickle of the cropped hair under her hands.

What else was she supposed to do? The whole ex thing got real ugly when you tried to balance it out.

After a minute or two, the clenched muscles at the back of Ray's neck let go. He looked up at her. There was a scary feeling of familiarity to the nearness and needing of that emotion-ravaged face. She forced up a smile and crushed all the feeling out of it. "Ready to go home now?"

He nodded and pulled back, looked away out the dark kitchen window. "Hey, I'm sorry about this, Ange."

"No problem. Go home now. Get some clean clothes."

He stood obediently and walked towards the door, then stopped. He was in front of another cluster of pictures, but she doubted he was seeing them. "I just couldn't believe it wouldn't work, y'know? It should have worked." He slumped again, sick with wanting some kind of happy ending.

Oh god, she was too tired to be having this conversation. "Yeah, Ray, it should have."

He got that old look, hearing whatever voice inside that was always telling him he was a total screw-up. "No, it was stupid. I should have known it wouldn't work."

"Ray, you can make this all your fault if you want to, but it isn't." god this was tough. "It could have been a lot worse, Ray. Somebody could . . . it could have been a hell of a lot worse."

He turned around and gave her that look that used to make her melt all over the place, that lost look that used to make her want to strike out at the rest of the world for his sake. Stupid, now.

"Thanks, Ange."

"Aw, no problem. Go home."

And this time he did.

She wandered back into the kitchen and put the extra mug away. And that, friends and neighbors, is what's known as an amicable divorce.

Two cups of coffee later she realized it was Saturday morning, and cursed him, forgetting that she wasn't supposed to be feeling these things. Outside, the birds started bragging about sunrise and birdy love, too stupid to realize that this was Chicago with winter just around the corner; no place for birds.

 

===

1996


End file.
